To paraphrase Georges Clemenceau on Brazil, the New York Jets are the team of the future—and always will be. Except for a few relatively recent expansion teams, no franchise in NFL history has less of a past than the Jets. In 1969 Joe Namath led the Jets to one of the biggest Super Bowl upsets ever, turned the pro football world on its ear, and helped accelerate the merger of the National and American Football leagues. That's it. There's nothing else in the Jets history to brag about.

A couple of years ago it looked like things were going to be different when the brash and blustery Rex Ryan took over the coaching job. In his first year, 2009, the Jets were 9-7 and very nearly went to the Super Bowl before losing the conference championship to the Indianapolis Colts in a tough 30-17 loss. The following season they posted their best record in decades, 11-5, and again looked headed for the big game. They lost again in the conference championship game to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 24-19, in a game in which they couldn't find a way to score in the fourth quarter from the one-yard line.

This past season, things spun entirely out of control: The Jets fell apart in the second half of the season, finishing 8-8, and the front office immediately began looking for scapegoats. It's worth noting that the Jets were just a single victory from matching the New York Giants' 9-7 regular season record. Nothing could be more bitter than the fact that the fortunes of both teams hinged on the next-to-the-last game of the season. On Christmas Eve the Jets lost to the Giants 29-14 in a sloppy, mistake-filled performance. From there, the Giants went on to their second Super Bowl victory in four years, and the Jets went back to saying "Wait till next year."

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Inevitably, the finger was pointed at Mark Sanchez, the 25-year-old quarterback from the U of Southern California whose performance declined sharply over the last two seasons. Or, rather, his statistics declined sharply over the last two seasons: My observation is that Sanchez was exactly the same quarterback in 2011 that he was the year before, but everything around him went to hell.

The New York Daily News was particularly savage, quoting nearly a dozen anonymous Jets to the effect that their quarterback had gotten "lazy," that he "just doesn't have the mental toughness to be great," and that they "see the organization babying him. They see him with a sense of entitlement. He's being given all this and hasn't done anything."

Yes, God forbid pro football franchises should pamper their quarterbacks.

I wonder if some of the players the Daily News spoke to—those brave, anonymous, 300-plus pounders—played on either the offensive or defensive lines that were responsible Sanchez's poor season? Or are there really football players who believe that a quarterback's performance isn't dependent on his team's pass blocking, the running game, and defensive play? Do the players who think Sanchez is coddled believe that he should block for himself, run the ball himself, and perhaps go out and contribute to the defense?

Let's look at the defense first. The Jets went from one of the best defenses in the league, giving up 304 points for sixth place in the NFL to one of the worst last year, allowing 363, 20th. Sanchez's run support sagged terribly; the Jets went from average 4.4 yards/rush in 2010 to 3.8 in 2011. As for the pass blocking, it was simply atrocious. It's hard to rate pass blocking because a team with a mobile QB will generally give up fewer sacks than a team with a passer who usually stays in the pocket, but in terms of sacks, hits, and "hurries," Sanchez was one of the most maligned QBs in football last year.

I wonder if the Daily News' anonymous sources included offensive tackles Wayne Hunter and D'Brickashaw Ferguson, who between them allowed 19 sacks, the league's worst performance by a pair of OTs.

It wasn't long till the Jets' management, one of the most consistently incompetent in the NFL, let slip that they might be interested in signing Peyton Manning, who almost certainly won't be back with the Colts this season. Again in the Daily News, Manish Mehta quoted a Jets source—anonymous of course—as saying, "C'mon, that's a no-brainer. If you have a chance to get a healthy 36-year old Peyton Manning and you don't do it, then you're stupid. If I could get a healthy 36-year old Peyton Manning, then hell yeah, I would trade Sanchez."

Whoever the guy is who said that, he got one thing right: The Jets' front office operates with no brains. You have a bad team riddled by dissension and, as back-up quarterback Greg McElroy was brave enough to point out, selfishness and a bad work ethic, and the cure for this is to bring in a quarterback past his physical peak who missed all of last season because of a neck injury? It's astonishing that anyone who knows anything about football would even consider such a scenario; it certainly seems astonishing that Manning himself would even consider putting on a New York green jersey (though to his credit, he hasn't yet shown much enthusiasm for the deal).

But because it's the off season, and all the hype is centered around LeBron James and Jeremy Lin and the upcoming baseball season, no one is taking the Jets' statement of intentions too seriously. I think they are seriously underrating the New York Jets' capacity for stupidity and greed. I seriously doubt if anyone thinks that bringing Peyton to the Meadowlands would result in anything but another grievous neck injury, but on the bright side, it would be a financial bonanza for the franchise.

How soon the New York press forgets. In the winter of 2008 the Jets whipped up a fantasy in which the team could only be redeemed by signing another aging quarterback with a Super Bowl ring, 39-year-old Brett Favre. All Favre's season in New York did was put off the inevitable: namely, the acquisition and development of a young quarterback. Actually, it did do one other thing: signing Favre raked in millions for the Jets in the form of jerseys, sweatshirts and t-shirts. Such a cynical move is the one way an NFL franchise can boost their revenues without really doing much work.

The signing of a new superstar, whether or not it does much to actually help the team, is a virtual license to print money. Never mind that when the superstar leaves the team, racks of clothing go unsold. There are still rumors of swarms of kids down in Panama and Costa Rica wearing Jets jerseys with "Favre" on the back, that being apparently where NFL merchandising dumped the unsold apparel when Favre moved on to the Minnesota Vikings.

If Peyton Manning does come to the Jets, the New York media will have a field day with the "Two Mannings in New York" theme, and within a week, there will be tens of thousands of various items to which Peyton's name and homely all-American visage can be attached. What will the likely end be to Manning's tenure in New York? I'd give odds that by 2014 you can get a real bargain on Peyton Manning jerseys on your Central-American vacation.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.